Tips and Shortcuts for Surviving and Succeeding in A&P.
As soon as an A&P student unwraps and opens their new textbook, they flip over that endpaper and find this one-page guide on how to get started on the path to success. That one page is loaded with great study tips and how-to-read-a-textbook guidance organized in an intuitive, graphic manner.
From metacognition to tackling new terminology to retrieval practice, this guide uses simple language to quickly outline the key strategies needed to succeed in A&P.
This guide also give faculty a place to quickly send students asking for study advice. And it gives faculty a place to find quick and easy tips for them to share in class or in a syllabus or course website.
Embedded throughout each chapter are brief Hints that remind students to use these strategies just at the moment they need them. Read more about these Hints at Embedded Hints Improve Reading Comprehension.
Patton Anatomy & Physiology is a textbook that is truly focused on helping students succeed!
The availability of Netter 3D Anatomy will still be there. And it will continue to be offered at no added cost to students. But it will be better in several ways.
Netter 3D Anatomy uses advanced gaming technology and interactive 3D anatomy models to learn, review, and teach anatomy. That's still true, but many improvements have been made to the ease-of-access and functionality of the platform.
Students using Patton Anatomy & Physiology will no longer have to create a separate account and login through a separate system. It'll all be contained within the Evolve Student Resources that students already use—and have logged into—for all their other textbook tools and resources. As instructors, we know how important a single-login system can be for our students.
Students and instructors will find that the ease of use of Netter 3D Anatomy has improved tremendously. We worked closely with the developer, wearing our teacher hats, then wearing our student hats, to make sure that any obstacles to easy use are eliminated. And we're very happy with the results!
Admittedly, I don't bring up the lymphatic system a lot in my day-to-day conversations. Not even in chats with other A&P enthusiasts. But it does come up sometimes in conversations about teaching or learning A&P. And when it does, I think the usual reaction involves some variety of love for the lymphatic system. So I'm puzzled.
In our Patton Anatomy & Physiology textbook, the lymphatic system certainly gets the love and attention it deserves. In fact, we feel that it deserves its own chapter! Unlike most A&P textbooks, Patton Anatomy & Physiology has a separate Lymphatic System chapter that follows Blood, Heart, Blood Vessels, and Circulation of Blood chapters and precedes the chapters Innate Immunity, Adaptive Immunity, and Stress.
My publisher has fully supported my (rather expensive) requests for creating new artwork and shooting new photographs. They have also supported my chapter revisions and have helped me find and revise passages that need improvement.
Our students—my readers and users of the textbook—must see themselves and their lived experiences reflected in this textbook and other learning materials. If they cannot, then it's difficult for them to see themselves fully accepted as part of the humanity that we explore in the anatomy and physiology course. This perceived lack of acceptance is a very real barrier to learning. When they cannot easily see themselves as part of the world of A&P, then it's also a barrier for students as they pursue their career path.
Diverse representation in Anatomy & Physiology is also important because students must develop an understanding, acceptance, and appreciation of the normal variation and diversity among the human population if they are to be successful as healthcare and athletic professionals.
The seventh edition of Anatomy & Physiology marked the moment when diverse and inclusive representation became a goal of every revision cycle. In the tenth edition, we were able to significantly diversify our photo collection and anatomical illustrations.
For example, in the tenth edition, we were among the first to use Black female subjects for the key illustrations of human musculature—overturning centuries of white males serving that role.
Diversity and inclusion has been a primary goal of the upcoming eleventh edition of Anatomy & Physiology, as well. As we review our page proofs and make our final tweaks, we continue our strong effort to make our textbook one of the most inclusive science textbooks on the market.
However, as much as we have made admirable progress and maintained our lead in this area, we still have a long way to go. It's a daunting task. And the path is not always clear. The resources are not always available. Our awareness is still expanding. Nonetheless, I think you'll be pleased with the new edition when it is published later this year.
And I hope you'll join us in pointing out where we've made good progress and where we still need to improve. We're in this together.
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Our book was the first A&P textbook to have an independent stress chapter. Since its introduction, we've been keeping the content up to date and relevant to student learning—and to the clinical applications of stress they'll be making in their professional courses and careers.
More recently, we enlisted the advice of the late Dr. Bruce McEwen, an icon of the modern concepts of human stress and it's real-life implications. Contributing author Dr. Peggie Williamson and I used Bruce's advice and his generous stack of resources to give our stress chapter a major refresh and update. You will find that the engaging story-of-stress approach remains, but with the more recent parts of that story reflected with greater clarity and relevance.
We need not let the concepts of stress be stressors themselves in our teaching and learning. Using the stress chapter in Anatomy & Physiology—a reader favorite—can help us all better understand the pivotal role stress can have in wellness and disease.
]]>Yeah, me too. That's why I've worked hard to move away from the gigantic-chapter model we see in most A&P textbooks to the modular model in our Anatomy & Physiology textbook. Instead of the usual 20-something large chapters commonly seen, our textbook has 48 chapters—but about the same number of pages as all the others. That is, those gigantic chapters have been broken down into smaller bits.
Besides the advantage of making our reading assignments less intimidating for students, the arrangement of concepts in smaller chapters also means that it is far easier for any instructor to move things around a bit to better suit their particular telling of the A&P story.
For example, because the introduction to homeostasis is its own short chapter, faculty have the choice to move it's place in the course to the very beginning—before all those directional terms and cavities, and so forth Or one could move it a bit later in the course, after the foundational chemistry, cell, and tissue coverage to just prior to beginning covering the first body system.
The short stress chapter could be moved earlier or later in the course, without having to separate it out of another larger chapter that covers other topics as well.
One could even decide to have students learn the appendicular skeleton first, before getting to that intimidating skull and vertebral column.
If you've not looked at the Patton Anatomy & Physiology text in a while, this might be a good time to check it out and think about it's modular structure may be a better fit for your A&P course.
You may want to learn more about the story of our smaller chapters by reading these brief posts:
Cross section of fallopian tube |
Chunking breaks content into smaller bits |
Students benefit from clear organization |